THE source of news about science and the environment as they relate to the Hawaiian Islands, hosted by veteran science reporter Jan TenBruggencate. Issues covered include archaeology, astronomy, botany, climate science, conservation, efficient transportation, geology, marine sciences, sustainability and zoology, with occasional forays into other areas, including traditional navigation and canoe voyaging.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Laysan albatross on their Hawaiian nesting islands are the
signature species for the devastating impacts of plastics in the marine
environment, but increasingly, the dead albatross are not alone.

The haunting image of the problem is dead albatross chicks,
their burst bellies jammed full of plastic lighters, bottle caps, discarded
toothbrushes and other multicolored debris.

(Image: A northern fulmar, this one photographed in 2008 in
Scotland. Credit: Dick Daniels, http://carolinabirds.org/)

But new studies on a Pacific seabird that comes ashore in
the Pacific Northwest is also showing dramatically high plastic contents. Some northern
fulmars have as much as 5 percent of their body weight in plastic in their
bellies.

These birds, known to science as Fulmarus glacialis, don’t feed exactly the same way albatross do,
but there’s plenty of plastic to go around. In fulmars, researchers found twine,
candy wrappers and styrofoam.

Let’s digress a little about the scope of the problem.

The albatross chicks die so full of plastic that they can’t
take in nutrition, but it’s not just mechanical fullness that kills sealife.
Also entanglement—turtles and seals trapped by abandoned nets and coils of rope—and
the chemicals released by the plastics they eat.

“Microplastics are both abundant and widespread within the
marine environment, found in their highest concentrations along coastlines and
within mid-ocean gyres. Ingestion of microplastics has been demonstrated in a
range of marine organisms, a process which may facilitate the transfer of
chemical additives or hydrophobic waterborne pollutants to biota,” says a report in Marine Pollution Bulletin, by Matthew
Cole and Pennie Lindequeof Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Claudia Halsband of the
High North Research Centre for Climate and the Environment in Norway, and
Tamara Galloway of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

If the plastic is big enough it can trap
and snare them, if it’s smaller it can choke them, and even when it’s
microscopic, it’s not gone.

“Unlike inorganic fines present in sea water, microplastics
concentrate persistent organic pollutants (POPs) by partition. The relevant
distribution coefficients for common POPs are several orders of magnitude in favour
of the plastic medium,” writes Anthony Andrady in the August 2011 issue of thesame journal.

Back to the northern fulmars, also called Arctic fulmars. We
don’t see them in Hawai`i since they cling to higher latitudes and colder
climates. But they are in the same family as the Hawaiian shearwaters and
petrels:

Researchers in the North Sea have used stomach contents of fulmars
to document high levels of plastics in that environment. We have long known
that the Pacific is also a dumping ground—even before last year’s Japan tsunami
scoured island coastlines and dumped their debris into the sea. Now research on
northern fulmars in the Pacific is confirming what we already knew from
albatross chicks—the plastic problem is massive.

“We quantified the stomach contents of 67
fulmars from beaches in the eastern North Pacific in 2009–2010 and found that
92.5% of fulmars had ingested an average of 36.8 pieces, or 0.385 g of plastic.
Plastic ingestion in these fulmars is among the highest recorded globally,” says the paper's abstract.

"Despite the close proximity of the 'Great Pacific
Garbage Patch,' an area of concentrated plastic pollution in the middle of the
North Pacific gyre, plastic pollution has not been considered an issue of
concern off our coast. But we've found similar amounts and incident rates of
plastic in beached northern fulmars here as those in the North Sea,” says
author Stephanie Avery-Gomm , a
zoologist at the University of British Columbia.

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RaisingIslands cruises selected scientific literature for research about Hawai'i or performed by Hawai'i scientists. If you've done this kind of research, or you're aware of some we've missed, pleased let us know (preferably with a link or a copy of the paper). The email is hawaiiwriter@gmail.com.Interested in what we're covering? Check the 'archives' below, or to search out areas of interest, see the 'labels' in this column.

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Raising Islands: What's in a name?

Raising Islands.

I borrow the name of this blog, gratefully and with permission, from my friend Nainoa Thompson. He uses the term “raising islands out of the sea” to create in the mind the experience of a voyaging canoe coming up on a distant shore, and of watching distant peaks rise out of the sea as the canoe approaches.

The first time I did it with him, our vehicle was the voyaging canoe Hokule'a and the island was Nihoa. I recall the crew's thrill at dawn, seeing the twin peaks of the island appear, and then the saddle between them, and finally the whole island. Thompson was the non-instrument navigator who had brought us there using only stars, clouds, wind, seas, birds and other cues.

The name of this blog also invokes the idea of responsibility—raising as lifting up, as caring for and conserving.

The key to responsibility is understanding. If we are to care for these islands, we need the kind of understanding of the environment that a traditional navigator needs.